# Migration — A Species on the Move Canonical URL: https://shipslides.com/d/catalog-culture-migration Raw viewer URL: https://content.shipslides.com/d/catalog-culture-migration/raw Category: Cuisine Slides: 13 Updated: 2026-05-17T20:56:00.648Z Tags: catalog, culture, migration ## Summary A species on the move Key sections include: MIGRATION; Out of Africa; The Bering Land Bridge; The Indo-European Expansion; The Bantu Expansion; Polynesian Expansion; The Atlantic Slave Trade; The Great European Emigration; Partitions and Refugees; Postwar Labour Migration. ## Slide Outline 1. MIGRATION 2. Out of Africa 3. The Bering Land Bridge 4. The Indo-European Expansion 5. The Bantu Expansion 6. Polynesian Expansion 7. The Atlantic Slave Trade 8. The Great European Emigration 9. Partitions and Refugees 10. Postwar Labour Migration 11. The Twenty-First-Century Crises 12. The Patterns of the Present 13. References & Further Voyaging ## Slide Transcript ### Slide 1: An Antique Atlas of Human Movement - ❦ - MIGRATION - A species on the move - ❦ - Compiled in the year of our Lord MMXXVI ### Slide 2: Out of Africa - ~70,000 years ago - The Genetic Record - Modern Homo sapiens arose in East Africa some 300,000 years ago. A successful dispersal across the Bab-el-Mandeb strait around 70,000 years ago seeded every non-African population alive today. - Y-chromosome and mitochondrial DNA trace this exodus to a small founder group — perhaps a few thousand individuals — whose descendants reached Australia by 50,000 BP and Europe by 45,000 BP. - ~2% - Neanderthal DNA in non-Africans ### Slide 3: The Bering Land Bridge - ~25,000 – 15,000 BP - Peopling of the Americas - During the Last Glacial Maximum, sea levels fell some 120 metres, exposing a thousand-mile-wide isthmus between Siberia and Alaska. Mammoth hunters followed game across this Mammoth Steppe. - Genetic and archaeological evidence (Monte Verde, Cooper's Ferry) now suggests a coastal kelp-highway dispersal as well, reaching the southern cone of Patagonia by ~14,500 BP. - 15,000 - Miles, Beringia to Tierra del Fuego ### Slide 4: The Indo-European Expansion - ~3500 BC - Horses, Wheels, and Steppe Ancestry - From the Pontic-Caspian steppe — between the Black and Caspian seas — the Yamnaya pastoralists radiated outward with domesticated horses, wheeled wagons, and a proto-language whose daughters now span from Iceland to Bengal. - Ancient DNA reveals a startling demographic turnover: by 2500 BC, Bronze Age Britain's gene pool was overwhelmingly replaced by steppe-derived ancestry within a few centuries. - "The horse was the steam-engine of the Bronze Age." ### Slide 5: The Bantu Expansion - ~3000 BC – 500 AD - Iron, Yams, and Southern Africa - From a homeland near the Cameroon-Nigeria border, Bantu-speaking farmers carried iron metallurgy, yam and oil-palm cultivation, and a tightly related family of languages across nearly a third of the African continent. - Today some 350 million people speak one of approximately 500 Bantu languages — Swahili, Zulu, Xhosa, Shona, Kikuyu among them. - ~500 - Bantu languages descended ### Slide 6: Polynesian Expansion - ~1000 BC – 1300 AD - The Pacific Colonized by Canoe and Stars - Of all human migrations, none required greater navigational courage than the Austronesian conquest of the Pacific. Voyaging in double-hulled outrigger canoes, Polynesians read the swells, the stars, and the flight-paths of birds. - From Tonga and Samoa they reached the Marquesas, then Hawaiʻi (~400 AD), Rapa Nui (~900 AD), and finally Aotearoa / New Zealand (~1300 AD) — the last great landmass discovered by humans. - 10M km2 - Of ocean settled - Double-hulled voyaging canoe under the Southern Cross ### Slide 7: The Atlantic Slave Trade - ~1500 – 1870 - Forced Displacement Across an Ocean - Over nearly four centuries, an estimated 12.5 million Africans were forcibly embarked aboard European ships bound for the Americas. Some 10.7 million survived the Middle Passage. - Brazil received roughly 4.9 million; the Caribbean colonies 4 million; Spanish America 1.3 million; and what is now the United States approximately 388,000. The trade reshaped three continents and built the wealth of empires. - 12.5M - Africans displaced - ~15% - Perished during Middle Passage ### Slide 8: The Great European Emigration - ~1820 – 1920 - Sixty Million Leave the Old World - Steam, steel, and starvation drove the largest voluntary migration in human history. The Irish Famine, German revolutions of 1848, and Russian pogroms expelled millions; the railroads, factories, and pampas of the New World absorbed them. - ~37M to the United States - ~7M to Argentina - ~5M to Canada - ~4M to Brazil - ~4M to Australia & New Zealand ### Slide 9: Partitions and Refugees - 1947 · 1948 · 1971 - Lines on Maps, Rivers of People - The retreating empires of the twentieth century left in their wake some of history's most violent population transfers, as new borders carved through ancient communities. - India & Pakistan, 1947 - Approximately 14 million displaced across the Radcliffe Line in the months following partition. Estimates of dead range from several hundred thousand to over a million. Trains arrived at Lahore and Amritsar carrying nothing but the slain. - Palestine, 1948 - The Nakba: roughly 700,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled during the war attending Israel's founding. Their descendants — over five million today — remain registered with UNRWA. - Bangladesh, 1971 - The Bangladesh Liberation War sent some 10 million refugees fleeing into India, the largest single refugee movement of the twentieth century. ### Slide 10: Postwar Labour Migration - 1945 – 1990 - Guest-workers and the Reconstructed West - Europe's postwar economic miracle ran on imported muscle. West Germany's Gastarbeiter programme, France's recruitment from the Maghreb, and Britain's invitation to the Caribbean and South Asia transformed European demography permanently. - Turkey → Germany: ~870,000 by 1973; over 3 million Turkish-Germans today. - Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia → France: several millions, reshaping French cities. - Caribbean → Britain: the Windrush generation, beginning 1948. - Mexico → United States: the Bracero Program (1942-1964) and beyond. - "We asked for workers; we got people instead." — Max Frisch ### Slide 11: The Twenty-First-Century Crises - 2011 – present - Syria, Venezuela, Ukraine — and the Climate - The 2010s broke records for human displacement. By 2024 the UNHCR counted over 120 million forcibly displaced people — more than at any point since the Second World War. - ~6.8M - Syrian refugees abroad - ~7.8M - Venezuelans abroad - ~6.5M - Ukrainian refugees in Europe - And on the horizon, a new driver: the climate. The World Bank projects up to 216 million internal climate migrants across six world regions by 2050 in a high-emissions scenario. - "The first climate refugees are already on the road. They simply do not yet have the name." ### Slide 12: The Patterns of the Present - Today - Brain Drain, Remittances, Demography - Remittances - Money sent home by migrants now exceeds foreign aid manyfold. In 2024 the World Bank recorded over $800 billion in remittance flows to low- and middle-income countries — for many nations, the single largest source of foreign exchange. - $800B+ - Annual remittances - Brain Drain & Demographic Balancing - Aging societies — Japan, Italy, South Korea, Germany — face shrinking workforces while sub-Saharan Africa adds a billion working-age people by 2050. Migration is the demographic equation's missing variable. - Doctors leave Lagos for London; engineers leave Bengaluru for the Bay Area; nurses leave Manila for everywhere. The wealthy nations import skill at the cost of those who paid to train it. - Of the eight billion alive today, roughly 281 million live outside the country of their birth — a population larger than Indonesia. ### Slide 13: References & Further Voyaging - ❦ - Selected Reading - Who We Are and How We Got Here — David Reich (2018) - The Horse, the Wheel, and Language — David W. Anthony (2007) - Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia — Christina Thompson (2019) - The Slave Trade — Hugh Thomas (1997) - The Age of Mass Migration — Hatton & Williamson (1998) - Midnight's Furies — Nisid Hajari (2015) - The Next Great Migration — Sonia Shah (2020) - Online Sources - Slave Voyages Database — slavevoyages.org - UNHCR Global Trends Report - World Bank Migration & Remittance Data - IOM World Migration Report - The Genographic Project Archive - Watch - YouTube: "human migration history" - YouTube: "out of africa migration" - ❦ - Finis ## Related Decks - [GREAT CITIES / Ten that changed history](https://shipslides.com/d/catalog-culture-cities) - [FASHION / Garments and what they say](https://shipslides.com/d/catalog-culture-fashion) - [FOOD / a global history](https://shipslides.com/d/catalog-culture-food) - [INTERNET CULTURE / forums, memes, attention](https://shipslides.com/d/catalog-culture-internet)